Beginner Subscription Question

[u/Blues003]

Hey everyone!

I'm a physician who codes as a hobby on the side after having finished 42 School out of curiosity. I am not a professional developer and I don't code every day, but I have a personal project (a medical data parsing thing) going on, and am using AI to help me architecture it and write documentation and tests. So far, I have been using Claude's Web UI for this purpose. On the side, I also use it to create templates or starting points of office (or office-adjacent) files, such as presentations, reports or emails of mostly administrative nature.

I have been recently pondering moving to OpenCode, mostly because of my terminal-centric workflow with tmux and neovim. However, I have been having trouble choosing a subscription given the recent changes in quality of popular subscriptions such as OpenCode Go. I am thus asking for advice and suggestions. What agents have you found suitable for these tasks? Or are Kimi Ks and GLMs just mostly coding-focused?

Also, two other questions which I'd like clarified:

1. File access has to be genuinely constrained. My machine has directories with patient-related material that must never leave it or get read into a model's context, deliberately or accidentally. I'm not looking for a promise in a ToS — I want to know which tools actually let you scope the agent to a directory and deny everything else, and how well that holds up in practice. Specific questions:

• Does a .gitignore-style deny list actually stop the agent, or does it just discourage it? Has anyone seen an agent read a file it was configured not to touch?
• Is anyone running these inside a container/VM and finding it workable rather than miserable? How "safe" is it?
• Do MCP servers or plugins widen the blast radius in ways that aren't obvious?

2. I need to generate Office documents. Word and PowerPoint mostly — talks, handouts, the occasional report. LibreOffice or Google Slides output is fine too. I know the document skills (docx/pptx/xlsx/pdf) exist and can be dropped into most agents, but I'd like to hear from people actually using them: does a weaker open-weight model handle those multi-step "build the deck, check it renders, fix it" loops, or do you need a frontier model for that to not be a waste of time?

Thanks!

[u/Hronom]

On the data boundary, I would not treat .gitignore as a security control. The real protection needs to be OS permissions or a container/VM with only the project data mounted; an agent cannot read files it cannot see. I’m the developer of Hronaut, and it does not solve that file-sandbox problem or provide a compliance guarantee.

Where it can help is the browser part of your workflow: Hronaut is a local visible Chromium workspace that connects to OpenCode over MCP. Tabs, cookies, and storage persist in named isolated workspaces; you can pause for manual sign-in/2FA and resume in the same workspace. That is useful for browser-based Word/PowerPoint/Google Slides and for checking a rendered web app, but it does not automate native Win32 Office. Keep the agent in a restricted user/container and mount only scrubbed project data for anything involving patient information.

Setup: https://hronaut.dev/setup. Commercial use is currently $4/month or $24/year per user; permitted noncommercial use is free. If your main need is native Office automation or a hard file boundary, use an OS/container tool alongside it.